The home healthcare industry is a multi-billion dollar field. Instead of requiring patients to undergo prolonged hospital stays or frequent visits to a clinic, a home care agency brings the medical services to the patient's location. Payment for services rendered is primarily paid by federal and state Medicare and Medicaid programs. Patient well-being often depends on the visit and attendance compliance of the visiting nurse, aide, or therapist, for example.
Home healthcare agencies dispatch nurses, aides, and therapists to the homes of patients to perform required healthcare assessments, tasks, and other vital services. The frequency and length of time of a visit and the care provided by the visiting professional are important to obtaining a positive outcome and improving the health of the patient. Government reimbursement to a home healthcare agency is paid on a per episode (sickness) basis; therefore, the visiting nurse is often required to recommend the frequency and type of visits by a caregiver. Thus, it is important to ensure compliance by the caregiver in attending the needed visits, and knowing what tasks and services are required for the specific patient. Tracking the duration of the actual visit is also important. Homecare agency administrators are then responsible for processing patient visit data records generated by the visiting staff to be transferred into billing, scheduling, and payroll systems.
Certain home healthcare reporting systems and processes rely on the visiting staff to self report their visit attendance performance. Disadvantageously, at times this results in increased miscommunication, fraud, and abuse by the visiting caregiver. The administrative staff of the home healthcare agency is faced with monitoring the off-site personnel by spot-checking visit attendance data or relying on patient complaints or feedback.
Another disadvantage to such self-reporting procedures is that the reporting is generally self-documented by visiting staff on paper reports. A full time visiting staff employee can perform over 1250 visits a year, which could require a typical administrative staff person to spend an average of five minutes or more per employee visit to process and enter the information into appropriate billing, scheduling, and payroll systems. This can be inefficient and costly. Accordingly, there is a need for a system that provides for improved monitoring, reporting, data communication, and/or tracking of information relating to field service personnel such as visiting staff in the home healthcare field.